Tales of the Aggronaut – Page 557

Dolly and Dot Are My Best Friends

August 14, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was the launch of Battle for Azeroth the new expansion for World of Warcraft, and as I said yesterday it sort of snuck up on me. Blizzard was doing a global release for the first time in my memory meaning that while a lot of the world did in fact get the game on August 14th… the United States got it in the evening of the 13th. So it was in fact midnight CEST on the 14th for Europe but for me personally it launched at 5pm my time. I was not however sitting at the keyboard waiting for the gates to open as it were… because it was 5 before I managed to get to town from work. That then triggered the whole list of things I need to do when I first get home as well as nomming some tasty noms… finally ending up at the keyboard around 6ish.

At that point I was pleasantly surprised that I got right in with zero queue or waiting. There were reports of folks having some issues with the login server, but thankfully I had none of those issues and effectively sailed right in. I even tempted fate about 8:30 last night and decided to swap from my desktop upstairs to my laptop downstairs… and even at that point I was able to log straight in without much issue. I am not sure if this is a smaller than normal launch day, or if they were just really that prepared for the launch. Whatever the case it went smoothly and collectively myself, Grace and Mor decided to get the desert zone out of the way first and spent the rest of the evening roaming around Vol’dun.

For my troubles I managed to get my amulet-of-not-artifact-power to level 2 just barely shy of level 3, collected 2 pieces of the upgradeable gear that has talent point unlocks on it, and dinged 111 with about halfway to 112. I consider it a very productive night given that I did not take any time off from work and really didn’t “grind” that hard at anything. I believe both Grace and Mor are further ahead than me, but at some point I will catch up and hopefully reach the first dungeon unlock, though in truth I didn’t notice if there was one we could queue for already or not. I am surprised at just how much story there is in this expansion… like not just text story but I seem to be drowning in really awesome cut scenes. If the rest of this expansion carries on the same way as the beginning has… it is going to maybe be one of the better expansions in World of Warcraft history even with the questionable PVP narrative.

The above video is going to be a bit of a spoiler, but if you care to watch… it features my favorite moment so far in Battle for Azeroth. Meerah the awesome Vulpera responsible for driving the caravan around Vol’dun serenades her pair of Alpacas. Dolly and Dot are the best and are probably going to be the break out hit from this expansion. It reminds me a lot of the singing Quaggan from Guild Wars 2, and is similarly memeable. Meerah herself was apparently voiced by the very amazing Deva Marie, so extra awesome bit about the quest. ~Dolly and Dot are my best friends~ ~they pull my wagon through dunes of sands~ ~they have small teeth and they love to eat…~ then sadly the song is cut off by a mean ole troll who doesn’t appreciate awesomeness.

I am hoping we get a lot more Meerah, Dolly and Dot as I go further into this zone.

Follow Up to Yesterdays Post

As a follow up to yesterdays post about Monster Hunter World PC… when I took a break to move downstairs to the laptop I decided to fire up the game there to see what sort of settings I would have to play on to get the game functional. What you are seeing is MHW on Low settings and 720p resolution and even then… I was only managing to see about 25 fps. For reference the gaming laptop I have is in the top bar of the site but also linking it here. As far as the stats go… it has:

Intel Core i7 4th Gen 4720HQ (2.60 GHz)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 2 GB GDDR5
16 GB Memory
1 TB HDD
128 GB SSD

The game is effectively unplayable given that I am only seeing 25 fps in town and even then it wildly fluctuates down into the teens and up into the thirties. Essentially hopefully you can make your own determinations as to how well the game is going to run on your system between the two baselines I have given you. Now the positive is… steam does allow you to return games if you end up trying it out and it simply not working at all. Personally right now I am streaming Monster Hunter World through Parsec on my gaming desktop upstairs when I am playing downstairs on the laptop. This is honestly the way I am gaming most of the time these days and is probably going to keep me from upgrading that laptop anytime soon.

Monster Hunter World PC Thoughts

August 13, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend I played a significant amount of Monster Hunter World on the PC. This morning I am going to talk a bit about my thoughts related to it and why it maybe isn’t the dumpster fire that the internet seems to think it is. First off you are not going to get much general Monster Hunter commentary since I have belabored that point at length on this blog. I love the game and think that for the most part everyone should give it a shot on whatever platform seems most comfortable for you personally. I played the hell out of it on the PS4 and only backed off a bit when I got bit by the Elder Scrolls Online bug again… which has moved recently into desperately trying to prepare for the World of Warcraft expansion. Basically don’t ever take me moving on from a game as a reason not to play it because quite honestly I am fickle as hell when it comes to game. I play a lot of different things and shift wildly between them as the mood suits me.

You can get a link to my current PC build up in the menu of this site but for those reading via RSS I will summarize the high points. The relevant information:

I technically have an SSD in this system but have long since run out of space to run games from it… so for the most part I linked the drive that the game itself is running on. For sake of reference I attempted to screenshot all of the relevant graphical settings I am using.

Essentially I set the resolution to 1080p and attempted to max everything out to see what sort of gameplay that would give me. For the most part I get 60 frames per second, with the occasional dip into the 55ish territory as you can sometimes see sub 60 numbers in the lower left hand corner of these screenshots. However it feels very smooth given that I personally cannot seem to differentiate between about 40 fps and 60 fps that well. Ultimately I wanted to throw these numbers out there however I have a 5th gen x99 setup running a still fairly beefy GTX 980 graphics card. Your mileage may vary wildly if you are using a system less capable than that, but I am not really sure how far below.

The game looks infinitely better than it did on the PS4 and had I the time this weekend I would have installed it on my laptop to see what sort of concessions I needed to make it get it running on a far lower end machine. The laptop being a 4th Gen i7 which is the generation of processor in the recommended settings, and a mobile gtx 960M… which given the rules of mobile cards means it likely performs about the same as a desktop 700 series since the desktop did not get the 800 series. Regardless it is further testing I want to do so that I could give some estimates of what the game would run like and look like on a lower end machine. The truth is I played most of the weekend on the laptop, but I did so using Parsec streaming off of my gaming machine upstairs. I still am deeply in love with that software.

The biggest takeaway for me personally is just how phenomenally good the game looks on the PC. On the baseline PS4 everything felt very muddy for lack of a better word. There were lots of moments when everything seemed like there was a thin coat of vasoline on the lens and you couldn’t quite focus on anything specific. This means that a lot of the vistas in this game were completely lost to me and might as well have been static background images. However on the PC there have been numerous points where I just stop and stare the the scenes in awe of just how cool everything looks. I have a hard drive full of screenshots already and according to steam I am only twelve hours into the game.

It is highly likely that this is an experience that the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro players have already had… but for use plebs still stuck on the lower end machines in this generation… the difference is extremely noticeable. Now all of that said… my awe of the game comes from a console player getting to see the world I already love in much higher detail. From the general standpoint of a PC gamer… the game still has some wonky stuff going on in the way that the world looks and it is the same sort of stuff you see in a lot of console ports. Textures don’t always look as crisp as you might expect and what appears to be in focus versus blurred out is all over the place. Notice in the above image who the background appears so much crisper than the character in the foreground for example, just random goofy stuff that you don’t notice in motion but do notice when the action stops.

One of the weirder revelations for me personally is that the game is completely connected into steam groups… and seems to rely on your steam friends list and the groups you are a member of in place of the clan system. This means that I already happen to have a Greysky Armada group ready to go and you can see me up in the gathering hall flying the colors of our guild… even taking into account the custom imagery we uploaded for it from FFXIV. The only problem here is… I think those of us who have lots of groups and massive friend lists at this point… are maybe bogging down the network? It seems to take forever to bring up a friends list dialog, or to browse the sessions that your friends are in. This seems to have improved over the week, but is still way more sluggish than it felt on the console.

The real problem however is that the network connectivity seems to be extremely fickle, with Match Making generally not working at all… and the browsing of existing sessions working about as well. You are going to see this window a lot with a 50382-MW1 error being throw which is essentially the “cannot connect” generic error message. Spawning your own instance however seems to work reliably well, and joining an instance a friend is in also seems to work fairly well. I’ve managed to play with my friend Wolfy at several points during the weekend, but just go into the situation expecting things to be less than reliable. I feel like the PC is a leap forward overall given that it allows you to integrate with your existing list of Steam friends… but the overall way that grouping works in Monster Hunter World is still extremely awkward. This is one thing that Dauntless has going for it, is that grouping as a whole just feels more natural.

If you want to see me fail miserably at a hunt and mash the shit out of my keyboard and mouse here is the stream from Sunday morning. The keyboard is getting more comfortable as I go but I will say it was a challenge to get used to after being fairly comfortable with the PS4 controller. For the most part I have rolled with the default keybinds, but you can in fact remap most everything. The only thing that I really have changed is that the initial set up for Longsword was Left Mouse for basic attacks, Right Mouse for thrust, and Ctrl Key for Spirit Blade… which was functional but not exactly fitting with the priority that I have those attacks. I swapped Right Mouse and Ctrl to give me something that feels more natural given that I rarely actually thrust, the only negative however is that it makes it more challenging to do the leap out of the way slash attack. My fingers are long however and for the most part I can hit any ability that I need to. Your mileage may vary given how comfortable you are reaching into odd spots on the keyboard. I do however need to sort out something other than F1 + Number to get to the quick bar items because that really doesn’t work for me right now.

All in all I am really happy with the PC port and especially if you have been waiting in the wings due to a lack of console… you should totally pick this up. From what I am hearing it is both the biggest selling Japanese Steam game of all time, and the biggest Steam launch of 2018 so far… so much of the issues that are happening currently are probably just compounded by that fact. As the crush of players coming in to hunt some monsters dwindles a bit… I think a lot of the network weirdness is going to mysteriously go away. It is 7 am CST and right now Steam Charts is showing 245,535 concurrent players… with an all-time peak of 329,333 which was also achieved apparently in the last 24 hours. Basically it is super popular right now and as a result there are going to be some growing pains. If you cannot deal with that maybe wait a month before picking it up, however the game does always default back to a single player state allowing you to get in and experience the game play regardless of the current network conditions.

If you found yourself on the fence about this title I hope this post offers some wisdom. Like I said I need to get in and actually install the game on my laptop to give it a lower end impression as well. I will try and do that over the coming days… but not likely tonight given that apparently Battle For Azeroth launches at 2pm CST? Talk about that game release sneaking up on me. I hope you have a great day and an awesome week.

Dealing with Absences

August 10, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday was crazy. It was one of those days when moments after checking my phone I realized things had gone south with the patch cycle from the night before. I tried remoting into things from home and had no luck, so I hurriedly shower, dressed and drove into work to see if I could raise anyone to get the matter resolved. I left so rapidly that I freaked my poor wife out who was out on a walk… and she came home to my vehicle being missing from the drive way. The other bad thing is that I didn’t actually get breakfast meaning I was probably more grumpy than intended during the entire day. The problem with running on adrenaline is that there is an inevitable crash… which came about noonish. All of this said… I didn’t get to do a morning blog post yesterday and I was not in the proper frame of mind when I got home to do one either.

As a result this morning I am going to use this incident as a teaching moment. There will be times when you just cannot force a blog post out of yourself… and that is okay. When I was doing my “Grand Experiment” that involved posting every single day I managed to make it 1121 days without missing a post or a little over three years. That streak sorta developed a life of its own as time went on, but I knew sooner or later I would need to break it for my own sanity. Knowing that regardless of the day that you had to get up and write something was fairly oppressive. I would literally day dream about stopping cold turkey, and then ultimately talk myself back down off that ledge. Ultimately when the time came I made a compromise and switched the blog for the last couple of years over to week days only, that way I could have the weekends to myself to leisurely do whatever comes along.

The truth is… I would have probably been a lot happier with my streak of posts if I had allowed myself to have the occasional day off. The thing with posting is that you need to be doing it regularly to gain reader traction, which for me at least translated into forcing myself to post something regardless of circumstances every day. The truth however is that you simply need not to allow yourself to fall completely off the wagon. It is fine to take a few days off here or there but for me at least the most important aspect is to get back to posting as soon as you feel able to. The early days of my blog were a tale of a flurry of posts with massive gaps in between… some of them months long. The longer I was away the harder it seemed to create a post worth the justification of how long I was gone. It was as though I needed to come up with some epic reason why I just wasn’t feeling up to writing about myself or the games I was playing.

In my experience however you just need to post something… anything… to get yourself over the hump after an absence. You could post about what you had for breakfast… or in my case yesterday the lack thereof. You talk about whatever stressers caused you to need to duck your head back into your shell and turtle for awhile. You could write about something on the horizon that you are looking forward to, or about something that you just accomplished that you are still thinking about. The point is just to write something to get yourself over that initial gap in content and back into the habit of regularly posting again.

One of the things that I like about my current schedule is I feel like it gives me the room for these gaps. Is it an extended weekend that includes a few days of vacatrion? Then I have the option of writing on those days or just saying screw it and taking the entire time off from the blog. Is there a time when life has just become too much and I cannot fit proper writing in? Then a gap in the middle of the week is honestly no worse than a gap at the end of it. Basically the schedule that allows for absences and not holding myself to some nonsense like those 1121 posts in a row… makes the blogging experience far more livable.

I think ultimately that is why I have shifted things around this year for Blaugust is that I realized over time I was trying to get people to sign up for something that was largely unrealistic. After that first Blaugust I noticed that the majority of “winners” that managed to get in all 31 posts in a month… also wound up taking a full month off as a result. A not insignificant number of those blogs simply ceased to exist afterwards… or maybe had a few false starts at getting back at posting without ever really returning. Basically Blaugust and that schedule had killed blogs… which was the exact opposite of what I was hoping would happen. I kept shifting around the format until in 2016 I simply couldn’t handle taking anything else on that year… as was apparently the case with all of the events in our community. So now as Blaugust has returned… my hope has been that the focus be on just posting more regularly and also participating in the community… rather than trying to run some race.

I am not entirely certain if this post will help anyone, but I thought it was worth talking about the mindset I now take towards dealing with absences. I hope you are having an awesome day and I highly suggest getting out and checking some of the other blogs participating in Blaugust. Here are some resources to help you get started…

Google Sheet of Participants I am maintaining
Blaugust 2018 OPML List that Nogamara/Armagon is maintaining
Blaugust 2018 Twitter List that Chestnut is maintaining

There is still plenty of time left in the month to participate. If you are interested check out some of these links.

Original Blaugust Reborn Post on this blog
Blaugust Reborn Sign-Up Sheet
Blaugust Discord Server
Crudely Hacked Together Blaugust Calendar of Events

Side note: The images don’t mean much of anything but I played some Monster Hunter World on PC last night and am getting tired of just posting the Blaugust logo over and over on these.

Jason Jessee Board

August 8, 2018 by Belghast

This week was originally designated as “Get to Know Each Other Week” in my master scheme but I feel like that is well under way in part thanks to the existence of the Blaugust Discord. If you have not joined the discord I highly suggest doing so, also if you have not signed up for the event then there is still plenty of time to get involved. For as generally open as I am with my readers about a lot of things… I still find it fairly hard to actually talk about myself in any sort of directed way. Sure while I am in the middle of writing about a topic there are a bunch of real life details that end up getting thrown into the mix for flavor, but to sit down and write a specific topic about me as a person… that is a whole other challenge.

I was born in 1976 on the wane of the seventies and the cusp of the eighties… then spent my high school and college years in the nineties giving me a really odd blend of cultural experiences. Each of those decades left its own indelible mark on my psyche. Another piece of the puzzle is the fact that I was the only child of a machinist by day and occasionally professional photographer by night and weekend… and a home economics teacher. I grew up in Rural Americana in the middle of the part of Oklahoma aptly referred to as “Green Country” in a town with a population of around 2000 give or take a few. We lived just far enough outside of the city limits to prevent us from getting cable… or me having many kids to play with.

That means a good deal of my life was spent entertaining myself through copious amounts of imagination and a strong dash of public television. I’ve talked a bit about my attachment to Mister Roger’s Neighborhood but I was equally attracted to adult programs like Nova. For the first several years of my life I spent the majority of my time with my grandmother and grandfather who served as a babysitter while my folks worked. My grandmother also doubled as my companion on so many adventures from learning how to cook, to roaming around in the pasture… to playing rousing games of candyland. There were many times come Friday night when my folks came to pick me up, that I would announce that I was staying the weekend.

As time passed and I aged those weekends with my grandparents were replaced with staying over at friends houses. There was a circle of two other close friends that I had and it seemed like every single weekend we were gathered together at one of the houses. I always enjoyed the act of getting out of my own family and melding into another one for the weekend. In late middle school one of the trio moved away and we were left with a duo. By the time high school rolled around things started to get a little strained, since my partner in crime was largely forced into sports by his father who wanted him to follow in his own footsteps… and I didn’t really have the equivalent pressure pushing me in that direction.

We all saw each other pretty often because around about this time skateboarding was a massive thing. My first “real” deck that I planned for and bought on my own was the Jason Jessee Neptune deck, and I wish I still had it if for no reason other than to hang it on the wall. I’ve contemplated buying one of the modern reproductions to do that, but its an awful pricey expense for a piece of kitch. Skating lead its way to other drift compatible activities… like playing in a band that ultimately formed around the nexus of a few of us that hung out frequently. I played the drums, the friend from middle school played the bass and patterned himself after Flea of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and the other friend with seemingly unlimited means bought a sweet telecaster and played lead guitar. We never really coalesced on a proper band name… we were FSU for awhile which we thought was edgy because it stood for Fucking Shut Up. Later we performed under the name Jive Daddies… which I always thought was kinda dumb but was overridden by the other two.

During my junior year however I got really sick. I started having these black outs and managed to park my car perfectly in a ditch down from my house once. It was ultimately sorted out that I had a pinched blood vessel in my neck, that was the side effect of getting rear ended in a car wreck and developing a minor case of whiplash. However it took awhile to sort that out and during this time I sorta drifted away from that circle of friends and built a new one. One of the truths of small time life is the lack of things to do… leads kids towards copious amounts of alcohol and drug abuse. My original duo of friends found their way into more serious paths leading towards hard drugs, and that was not a journey I was willing to follow them on. So really my illness became a convenient excuse to simply stop participating and extract myself from that situation.

Another thing that happened around this time is that my family finally got a computer. It was a 386SX 16 MHz without a math co-processor with 2 meg of ram and a 90 MB hard drive that at the time seemed like all the space I would ever need. It had no sound card because those simply did not come with computers standard at that point and was largely designed for business products running Windows 3.0 originally…. and later upgraded to the revolutionary 3.1. I learned computers through necessity, because I kept doing something to jack the machine up and then needing to figure out how to fix it before my dad got home. Largely these interludes involved me trying to sort out how to get more than 16 colors in windows paint… it was simpler time.

The new circle of friends and I vacillated between two activities… pen and paper gaming and pouring over whatever bootleg games we managed to get from someone that had a relative in college and would ship us home boxes of pirated games. Getting anything new was pretty much out of the question because at this point we had no access to stores that sold anything even vaguely related to PC gaming. At some point I stumbled upon a bookstore that happened to have 5.25 inch floppies with shareware on them and got my first copy of Wolfenstein 3D and an editor that someone made for it. We obsessed over building levels to the game and the result was usually one person building a level and another person trying to run through it.

I feel like at this point I have already typed too much information about myself, so I am going to cut things off at this point. We are now circa 1992 and on the cusp of Magic the Gathering being a thing. I’ve recently gotten back in touch with one of the members of the little crew that I played table top games with, so I fully expect him to respond here at some point. I do miss those days when things were so much simpler and it seemed like we had all of the time in the world to hang out and do stuff together. Time moves so much faster as you get older, and busier, and have your attention fragmented by dozens of things at the same time. I might pick up tomorrow with some more details that I maybe glazed over, but like I said… getting any sort of coherent narrative out of me about myself is a challenge.